WordPress Plugins to Speed Up Your WordPress Site

Speeding up your WordPress blog goes a long way to improve its popularity. As the website loads faster, your visitor enjoys browsing, driving high traffic and generating revenue. While there are many proven ways to boost a site’s performance (a lot of these are explained in the WordPress Optimization Tips and Tricks post), in this article we will take a look at some WordPress plugins that allows you to perform critical front-end and back-end optimizations, within the comfort of your WordPress dashboard.

In the first section of this article I have listed the well known WordPress caching plugins and my recommendation. The next section has a list of few nice utility type plugins which you might find useful (depending on your situation). Please note that you don’t need to install all of the plugins listed here on your site (Just pick whatever fits your needs).

Top WordPress Caching Plugins

W3 Total Cache

A lot of people still use the WP Super Cache plugin. WP Super Cache is a nice plugin but have you tried the W3 Total Cache plugin yet? If you are using a WordPress caching plugin and you have never tried the W3 Total Cache then you seriously need to give this plugin a go. W3 Total Cache is a relatively newer caching plugin with better performance and the configuration is much easier and cleaner. It works nicely with the WP eStore, WP eMember and the WP Affiliate Platform Plugins too.

W3 Total Cache is the fastest and most complete WordPress performance optimization plugin. Trusted by many popular sites like: mashable.com, smashingmagazine.com, tipsandtricks-hq.com 🙂 and others.

Hyper Cache

Hyper Cache is a new caching system for WordPress, specifically written for people who have their blogs on low resources hosting provider (CPU and MySQL). It works even with hosting based on Microsoft IIS.

WP-Cache

WP-Cache is an efficient WordPress page caching system to make your site much faster and responsive. It works by caching WorPress pages and storing them in a static file for serving future requests directly from the file rather than loading and compiling the whole PHP code and then building the page from the database.

DB Cache

The DB Cache plugin caches every database query with given lifetime. It is much faster than other HTML caching plugins and uses less disk space for caching.

Other Useful Site Speed Related Plugins

WP Optimize

WP Optimize allows you to extensively clean up your WordPress database and optimize it without doing manual queries. It can delete all post revisions, spam comments, unapproved comments, optimize database tables etc in one click.

Image Optimization Plugins

There are a few nice image optimization plugins that can be very helpful to optimize your media library images. Read this detailed guide on image optimization plugins tutorial to learn which plugins you can use to auto-optimize your images.

Clean Options

As you go on installing, using and uninstalling plugins on WordPress, the ‘wp_options’ table becomes bloated. Even some themes use this table to store settings related data. Some of those records don’t get deleted as the plugin/theme is uninstalled. The table continues to grow and contribute to progressively slower load times. The Clean Options plugin gives users an easy way to get a bloated wp_options table down to a manageable size. It’s equipped with many built-in safety features so you don’t accidentally delete any data that’s needed for your blog to operate.

WP Super Minify

WP Super Minify is a light weight plugin that combines, minifies, and caches inline JavaScript and CSS files on demand to speed up page loads.

Hopefully you will find some of these plugins useful. Also, checkout the list of best WordPress plugins to find out what other plugins you should be using.

I’ve uninstalled this plugin because without it my website perform the best.

stevpteresonnsays:

January 2, 2013 at 8:38 am

thnx for infromation i will use w3 total cache plugin too now

Jijin Mohansays:

November 27, 2012 at 3:10 pm

W3 Total Cache plugin work like charm. I been searching for some tips to increase my blog loading speed and never know about this plugin, I’m a newbie BTW. Very informative post mate and yeah I bookmarked your blog for future references! Thank you very much for sharing.

denise durbandsays:

April 29, 2012 at 1:18 pm

I read both your plugin article and our article on optimizing your site and I am walking (actually i am sitting) away with more knowledge than I had intended on getting. Thank you for the very informative content. I have now bookmarked you. Great writing.

For IFrameWidgets plugin, I want to say one thing that it is not necessary that it will increase speed. I know that IFrame takes more time to create. I think better option is to write Javascript tag like this:
document.write(‘<' + script' + …);
or if possible,write your script tag in Google Analytics style.

I’m considering a plugin like these because eStore is causing major hanging but I think its a Javascript problem.

I’ve tried the Minify plugin and that disables Ajax in a lot of themes. I don’t like the idea of installing a plugin to speed up WordPress because it is technically fast enough already. If your blog is going slow, get rid of your plugins, get a good theme and develop your own basic plugins that do only what you need them to none of the extras.

You failed to mention WEBO Site Speed Up. I tried to use some of the others you mentioned above but found that Site SpeedUp increased my site’s page load speed by several orders of magnitude; from 66 YSlow to 97, and 96 Page Speed

adminsays:

May 19, 2010 at 11:02 am

I use the W3 Total Cache plugin too and it seem to work really well without any tweaking.

Asifsays:

May 19, 2010 at 10:52 am

Another very nice and informative post! I am liking the W3 Total Cache plugin, it seem to do pretty much everything.